


Sand in the Wind

by multipurposetoolguy



Series: Tumblr Prompts [4]
Category: Ex Machina (2015), Logan Lucky (2017), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (only in a dream), Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Mild Blood, Military Backstory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, as it were, kylux au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 17:18:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12775737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/multipurposetoolguy/pseuds/multipurposetoolguy
Summary: Clyde revisits his past in dreams and it starts to drag his future into the mess. Luckily he's not alone anymore.(FollowsCountry Roadssome months later)





	Sand in the Wind

**Author's Note:**

> I said I would right more luckybang eventually and HERE I AM!! Thanks to a wonderful anon on tumblr who gave me the prompt: "Hey, I'm with you, okay? Always." UGH! <3
> 
> I just really love these boys, and I hope you guys do too <3

**** His left arm is hot underneath the thick knit of his uniform, baking where cut up shapes of sunlight fall across it through the bones of the transpo buggy. There is nothing between the frames and beams of the windows, open to the sand and the sky as they rumble along. The wind buffets hot and gritty into his face, and he has to turn away before getting it in his eyes. 

They jostle over a bump in the road and Clyde looks into the faces of his squad, and finds he doesn’t recognize any of them. They’re sitting huddled with him in the jeep, crouched around their weapons and looking blank, bored, but he can’t remember any of their names, or get any of their features to settle. Which is strange, because he went through the ringer with these guys, he knows them like he knows the fingers on his hand. But the man next to him is like a blank spot in his memory, a smudged spot on paper where something’s been erased. Their thighs are touching but he doesn’t feel warm through the fabric; when Clyde looks up he doesn’t really have a face, just a vague approximation of a neutral expression almost more his own intuition than visually apparent.

He shakes his head, willing the strange feeling to pass. Looking back out the window he sees no landmarks, no mountains or dunes or cities huddled low and hazy in the heat. He can’t remember where they’re leaving from or where they’re headed, only the thrum of the sand pelting the undercarriage of the transpo beneath him and the wind still whipping unforgiving between the helmet at his brow and the strap across his chin. He doesn’t know where they’re going, or how long it will take to get there. He shifts his weapon, leans against the bars, and waits. 

After a minute of endless rumbling, of wondering if they’re even moving at all, the man next to him reaches over and grabs his arm. 

“Clyde.”

He turns to the faceless man and startles when he sees that he has found one, a face he knows like the fingers on a hand that isn’t there anymore.  _ Wait,  _ he thinks,  _ my arm--  _

“I have to go,” Caleb says, dressed in the same itchy combats, with the same bucket on his head and the same strap around his chin. It looks wrong on him. He doesn’t let go of Clyde’s arm. 

“We’re going, where, where d’you need to go?”  _ Why not stay?  _ He feels Caleb’s fingers digging hard into his right arm. He can’t feel the sunlight on his left anymore, or anything else at all.

“I have to go, I just have to go.” Caleb says again, looking pained and sick and still  _ so so wrong  _ with chevrons on his arm. 

He tries to move his left hand, to put it over Caleb’s and calm him, finds he can’t. “We’re goin’ to the airport, we’re almost there. We can go together,” Clyde says. He remembers now, he’s on a convoy headed for the airstrip and then headed all the way home. His time is up, he’d already written Jimmy; his ship-out date was just in time for Sadie’s next recital and Jimmy told him she was  _ so happy  _ her uncle’s gonna be there--

Caleb’s shaking his head, hard and frantic, telling him over and over, “I have to go, I have to go, I have to go, I just have to go--” 

He takes his hand away, leaving deep wrinkles in Clyde’s sleeve. He darts his hand out to grab at Caleb’s, desperate to hold onto him. He doesn’t know why but he feels like if he lets go, if they stop touching, he’ll dissolve into the hot air, tiny parts of him mingling with the grains of sand still pelting them like needles. He’ll stop existing. 

“Cay, don’t--” The moment that his fingers wrap around Caleb’s is the exact same one that the convoy lurches, up on two wheels and shuddering with the impact. He doesn’t know what hit them, he can’t  _ see,  _ everything is smoke and metal and red-wet camouflage and he’s coughing, choking on fear and sand in his lungs. He thinks they might be upside down, skittering across the dunes. He can’t feel his arm, and he can’t feel Caleb’s fingers anymore. 

_ “Caleb!”  _

He blinks and suddenly there is no more burnt up buggy, no more faceless soldiers, just endless tawny dips and rises stretching as far as he can see, and farther still. He’s on his knees, lurched forward in the sand, completely and utterly alone in the scorched desolation. 

Only he’s not, Caleb is there. He’s lying on his back, ten feet away, not moving. He’s out of his borrowed uniform, his bright hair wild and tugged even wilder by the wind, but it doesn’t comfort him. He’s wearing the  _ Back to the Future _ t-shirt Clyde found in a thrift store and bought him on a whim when they were sixteen, and it’s stained a deep, nauseating red.

Clyde scrambles to his feet with a scream pounding behind his eyes and clawing out his throat, stumbling when he finds he can’t put any weight on his left arm; it’s stiff and lifeless, like it’s made of plastic.  _ It is,  _ it’s his new arm, and he’s not wearing his uniform anymore either but it doesn’t register above the blinding, shredding  _ need  _ to get to Caleb. 

Finally he can stand and stumbles over, falling heavily to his side and trying to breath around the sobs passing like stones in his throat. Caleb’s eyes are open, to the sand and the sky.  

He cups Caleb’s face with his good hand, slides it down to his chest where the violence is blooming faster and faster, unfurling across him. “Cay, Caleb hey- stay with me now, don’t you go anywhere, I’m h-here, I’m--” He chokes off into another sob that he grinds between his teeth, hunkered over him and already feeling his body trying to split apart and trickle down, into pieces so small and broken and sharp they’re indistinguishable from the sand that’s fucking everywhere. 

Caleb doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, and Clyde’s hand comes back red. 

He doesn’t know what happened or how but he knows it’s his fault, it’s his fault it’s his fault Caleb’s dead and it’s  _ all his fault-- _

He jerks awake with a gulp of air like he’d been drowning, head held under a thick and choking bog of terror. He’s sitting up in bed,  _ his _ bed, at home inside his trailer. His arm is on his bedside table, next to his reading glasses and a wristwatch that isn’t his. The moonlight spills yellow and soft through the curtains, splayed across the sheets. 

There’s a hand on his right arm. 

“Clyde? You were shouting, in your sleep. Nightmare?” It’s Caleb, Clyde could cry all over again because it’s  _ Caleb,  _ wearing a baggy Bob Seger t-shirt and sleepy and whole, rubbing at his eyes. 

Clyde heaves out a long and choppy breath, slumping forward and dropping his head into his hand. He’s shaking, though it’s eighty-two degrees in the molasses-dark of the third Wednesday of July, and he can’t seem to stop. 

He feels Caleb’s hand fall feather-light onto the swell of his shoulder blades, and he pushes back into the touch as he rubs slow, soothing circles. 

“The IED dream?” Caleb asks, in a way that says that it’s okay not to answer. It makes the corners of his eyes feel hot. 

“Yeah,” He says after a minute, “But--” He swallows. “It was different.” 

“Different how?” His hand doesn’t stop it’s circling, and Clyde doesn’t want it to. He also doesn’t want to say how exactly the dream was different, afraid that if he speaks it out loud the curse that hangs around his shoulders like a tattered old coat will latch onto the words and make a premonition out of them. He knows that Caleb knows this, that he’s only asking because sometimes it helps and  _ he wants to help him, _ help Clyde deal with his shit, and he feels that hot tickle in his eyes again. He speaks, he lets Caleb help.  

“You were there, in the convoy. Next to me.” 

He feels more than hears Caleb gasp, briefly, before shifting closer and asking, “Did I help? I probably didn’t, if I was wearing all that stuff you guys wear, It weighs more than I do.”

Clyde makes a noise that sounds like a laugh but isn’t. Caleb is trying, half asleep and so warm and  _ alive  _ next to him and he’s trying, and Clyde loves him for that more than anything. “No, you uh. You…” 

_ You said the words that cut me open up on that billboard and drunk for the first time. You said you had to go like here wasn’t good enough, like I was somethin’ you felt like runnin’ away from.  _

“It’s alright Clyde, I’m here. Take your time.”

Soft, gentle and all giving, no taking, and that’s what does it. The tears spill free over Clyde’s cheeks, hot and slick and tickling his nose where they run into the creases. He rubs at his face roughly and sucks in a shudder-y breath. 

“You died, Cay, you wanted to leave and then it-- you just-- I couldn’t--” The rest didn’t make it into actual words, just embarrassing sounds keening into his own t-shirt where Caleb has suddenly pulled him close; his face is pressed to Caleb’s chest, over his heartbeat. Hands in his hair, petting, soothing, shaking but only a little. Caleb rocks them gently, one arm wrapped tight around his back while the other doesn’t leave his hair, shushing him as he cries and murmuring calm nothings into his ear that mean everything to him. 

After a minute of choked and chewed-on sobs, and Caleb’s fourteenth or so  _ ‘it’s alright, you’re alright’,  _ Clyde sits up, but he doesn’t go far. He sits there, arms in his lap, staring at the sheets and embarrassed at the snot and tears that must be coating him in a pathetic film. Caleb is having none of it, it seems, and he cups Clyde’s face in both hands and tilts it until he meets his eyes. 

“Hey,” He says, gentle and earnest. He rubs his thumbs softly below Clyde’s eyes, tucks his hair behind each ear. Ever since Caleb weaseled out of him that his ears make him self-conscious, that he prefers to hide them behind his hair and pretend they aren’t the size of dinner plates, Caleb hasn’t left them alone; kissing them, running fingers around them, biting them. He kind of loves him for that, too. 

“Hey,” He says again, leaning in to give him a gentle press of his lips just between his eyebrows, the spot where his forehead wrinkles up when he’s upset, or embarrassed, or thinking real hard. Or, as he is currently, an awful mix of all three. “I’m with you, okay?” He leans in again, a soft slow kiss to his cheek, and a fresh tear slides down to meet his lips because then he says, “Always.”

Clyde crumbles, feeling like sand in the wind, and lets his face fall twisted up and wet onto Caleb’s shoulder. He snakes his arms around Caleb’s waist and just holds him, can’t get him close enough, has to feel him in his arms real and warm and safe. He turns, facing him more now, and Caleb takes the hint, turning as well and tucking his legs up over Clyde’s as his slide around him, fitting together like puzzle pieces. Caleb holds him like that, shuddering and breathing loud through his nose as he is, and he holds Caleb right back. 

_ I know,  _ he thinks, against all the odds and everything that’s happened in their past up on rickety billboards under the stars.  _ I know. Thank you.  _  
  


\--

 

By the time Clyde had shaken off the last vestiges of the dream and Caleb was yawning into his hair morning was lurking a murky grey out the window, heralding the sizzling summer day to come. Clyde had calmed down but couldn’t find sleep again by a long shot, and Caleb, well, Caleb is stubborn, and insisted that he wasn’t tired even as he nearly dunked his nose in his coffee. Clyde had laughed and pulled him close, and suggested they make use of the seldom-felt first light.

So here he sits, in the cab of his truck with the windows down and Caleb beside him, face tilted out into the wind that isn’t yet too hot and towards the fledgling honey-gold sunlight. He’s smiling, and Clyde finds he is too. They’ve got their poles in the bed behind them, his bait box nestled between Caleb’s feet. The lake waits for them, clear and calm. In no hurry, going nowhere. 

Rumbling down the dirt road that he knows like the freckles on his best friend’s face, racing the sun across the wind-kissed and undulating fields of barley and wheatgrass, Clyde feels something settle inside him. His arm hanging out the open window is hot under the cut up shapes of the sun, and the hand on his thigh is warmer and more reassuring than any words could ever be. 

Three things he knows are immovable, unbreakable truths: the sun rises and the sun sets, new days come. And now, always, Caleb stays.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry for the abuse of the em dash, I have a problem.
> 
> let me know what you think? <3


End file.
